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The ConnectedCOPS Leadership Award finalists have been determined. Approximately two dozen nominations for 21 officers from three countries were received for this award. The finalists in this category are pioneers, have demonstrated exemplary leadership and have mentored their peers.

Dale Stockton is a Senior Editor at Law Officer magazine, and one of seven judges for this category. “Leadership is so incredibly important in public safety, especially when you’re entering a relatively new area like social media,” he said, and added “It is really encouraging to see so many powerful examples of individuals who have stepped up and are leading the way for others.”

ConnectedCOPS Leadership Award

This award is given to the individual officer up to and including the rank of Sergeant (or its international equivalent) at any worldwide law enforcement agency who has singularly demonstrated exemplary and selfless leadership in the use of social media to improve public safety and/or enhance his or her agency’s community engagement and reputation. This individual is creative, innovative and fearless and shares what s/he knows by mentoring others, participating in public speaking opportunities and leading by example.

Because there were so many great leaders nominated in this category, the judges selected five finalists. They are listed below in no significant order:

Special Constable Tom Stirling, North Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Special Constable Tom Stirling worked diligently to bring the North Yorkshire Police Service into digital communications on his own time by designing a mobile application. He then taught himself how to program the app resulting in “NYP mobile”, the first mobile app in policing in England, all at no cost to his department. His work has earned him the “Outstanding Police Communicator” Award from the Association of Police Communicators and has been emulated by other departments.

Police Constable Ed Rogerson, North Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Police Constable Ed Rogerson is regarded as possibly the first officer in the UK to use social media for community engagement. Rogerson is nationally and internationally known for his use of social media and is often cited as an example of best practice. He regularly speaks at professional events about his use of social media in policing. His work has gained him near celebrity status among youth in the UK as they recognize him from Twitter and YouTube.

Constable Scott Mills, Toronto Police Service, Canada
Constable Mills is highly regarded as a global leader in police adoption of social media. One of his foremost qualities is that he works in service of others, in relentless pursuit to improve public safety and support others to do the same. Mills is the quintessential pioneer and has put in countless hours, he has endured much criticism from those who don’t or won’t understand, and yet he persists. Through his sincere and consistent approach, Mills has even gained support and a considerable following from unlikely groups, including gang members and activists.

Sergeant Rob Sutten, Portsmouth City Central Police, United Kingdom
Sergeant Sutten has been the leader and champion at the Hampshire Constabulary in the UK for his groundbreaking local use of Twitter. He is said to be innovate, charismatic and jovial. With his media department, he developed a fictional character called “Ninah” to develop crime prevention messages for children and incorporated humor and games. Ninah also tweets real-time updates about committed offenses, the thrill of her chase, as well as the arrest and result of conviction.

Sergeant Jay Turner, Hamilton Police Service, Canada
Sergeant Turner has taken Twitter use to a new level and is widely regarded as innovative and humorous. Because of the strength of his messaging on Twitter, he has significantly improved the public communication from HPS to citizens. Sergeant Turner mentors others at HPS, having personally developed five of the agency’s seven accounts, overcoming reluctance from his colleagues and supervisors.

This is the final awards category to be announced this week. Finalists in the other awards categories were announced earlier in the week on this blog and can be found at the links provided below. Winners will be announced September 10th at The SMILE Conference™ in Richmond, Virginia.

The ConnectedCOPS Awards were created by LAwS Communications with the intent of recognizing the good work being done by individual officers and law enforcement agencies with social media. The international law enforcement community will be considered for these awards. Any officer or agency anywhere in the world is eligible.

The ConnectedCOPS Excellence at a Large Agency Award finalists have been determined. This award generated more than a dozen nominations from five countries; three countries are represented in the finalists listing. The finalists in this category have demonstrated a proactive strategic approach to the implementation of open source technology into their communication plans.

Doug Wyllie, Senior Editor at Police One, was one of seven judges in this category. He said, “Because large agencies in particular have the manpower and resources to do some pretty incredible stuff with social media, that category was an especially hard one to rank. The nominations were oustanding.”

ConnectedCOPS Excellence at a Large Agency

This award is given to a law enforcement agency, anywhere in the world, of 151 sworn officers or more that has demonstrated overall excellence in the use of social media to enhance its services to the public. The agency exhibits leadership, creativity and innovation in its use of social media to engage, educate, recruit, and etc. The agency has a broad and deep understanding of social media use and applies sound governance and strategy in its social media operations. The agency also promotes the use of social networking in law enforcement through its outreach to colleagues and by mentoring others.

We have three finalists and they are (in no order of significance):

Reykjavik Police, Iceland
The Reykjavik Metropolitan Police (RMP) began using social media in late 2010. With 22,000 followers on Facebook in a country of 320,000, it’s one of the largest followings, per capital in the world. The social media implementation is a small step towards building digital policing in Iceland, the end product being a fully digital police station with additional presence in Twitter (the Chief is currently using Twitter) and YouTube. The RMP is finding that social media is both a cost-effective way of community policing but is also turning out to be one of the key points into building trust between the police and the public.

Toronto Police, Canada
The Toronto Police Service (TPS) put together a team of Service members at the end of 2010 to develop its social media communication strategy. They began implementing the strategy in January of 2011 and continue today. The TPS strategy includes the use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+ in an integrated approach across all Units, Community Consultative Groups and 17 Divisions of the Service. The TPS understands that the role of serving and protecting is all about relationships. They’re using social media for crowd control during protests and to collaborate to save lives. They also regularly debate issues like sexual assault, teen suicide prevention, and domestic violence. They are dedicated to implementing the vision of community collaboration for success and safety and using social media to engage and empower citizens.

New South Wales Police, Australia
The New South Wales Police (NSWP) began its Project Eyewatch in 2011 as its strategy to reinvigorate community engagement and openness in policing through the concept of Neighbourhood Watch in the 21st Century. NSWP’s Project Eyewatch uses Facebook to reduce crime through conscious security measure, visibility and community cohesion. Eyewatch is about empowering residents with the ability to participate in crime prevention activities online in their own homes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and is based on 4 key strategies: 1) Focus on people who need our help; 2) empower accountability; 3) balance priorities and 4) develop community capacity and sustainability.

Finalists in the other awards categories will be announced throughout this week on this blog. Check back to see the finalists for Excellence at a Small Agency tomorrow. Winners will be announced September 10th at The SMILE Conference™ in Richmond, Virginia.

The ConnectedCOPS Awards were created by LAwS Communications with the intent of recognizing the good work being done by individual officers and law enforcement agencies with social media. The international law enforcement community will be considered for these awards. Any officer or agency anywhere in the world is eligible.

Disclaimer: LAwS Communications served as a consultant to the Toronto Police Service during the development of its social media strategy and is not a judge on this or any of the ConnectedCOPS Awards.

The ConnectedCOPS Social Media Incident Management Award is generously sponsored by Nixle. Travis Scott is Vice President of Agency relations at Nixle. He said, “Nixle is proud to be the sponsor of the Social Media Incident Management award because in a world where social media has drastically changed the way that people communicate, it is critical that our local law enforcement and public safety embrace the power of these platforms as well. We at Nixle believe that the winner of this award should be considered a model agency that all other agencies can based their social media strategy on.”

Nominations for this award came from several countries. The finalists in this category are doing extraordinary work managing emergency events. The judges were very impressed with the quality of nominations in this category.

ConnectedCOPS Social Media Incident Management

This award is given to the law enforcement officer or agency anywhere in the world who has used social media to manage and/or influence a public safety/emergency event, whether unforeseen or known. This officer/agency has strategically and successfully implemented social media engagement techniques to positively and effectively communicate public safety information in an urgent or emergency situation.

We have three finalists and they are (in no particular order):

Queensland Police, Australia

The QPS Social Media strategy began in mid-2010 to provide timely and accurate public safety information, and to support operational police in the course of their duties. Later that year, on Christmas Eve, Cyclone Tasha made landfall creating flooding across Queensland. The agency primarily used Facebook and Twitter to keep the people of Queensland up to date with updates averaging every ten minutes. Radio and television stations were directing their audiences to the QPS Facebook page as the official source of information. Social media allowed QPS to transcend traditional communication boundaries, providing a much faster and more efficient service to the media both nationally and internationally via the QPS YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter pages. The robustness of social media sites allowed QPS to distribute high volumes of vital information and to maintain access to that information while many government websites crashed under the sheer weight of user traffic.

New South Wales Police, Australia

In 2012, the state of New South Wales, Australia was subject to severe flooding across the North West and South West of the State over an area twice the size of Texas. The New South Wales Police, having developed Project Eyewatch, used the program to create a range of warning notices during the extreme flooding in the New South Wales area. Project Eyewatch is a platform for the delivery of information to the community of NSW utilising Facebook. The “eyewatch” concept is about penetrating into and engaging the community to identify problems and work on a whole of community solution. In policing terms, this enhances their ability to environmentally scan their communities with a target on 1. Crime Prevention 2. Crime Detection 3. Emergency Management 4. Crisis Management and 5 Counter Terrorism Management. In terms of major emergencies, the State of NSW, through Project Eyewatch and its strategic links to all government response and combat agencies is in a solid position to inform community about emergencies, strategies to combat those emergencies and general safety information, prior to, during and post emergency.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, California

During the 2011 Christmas/New Year’s holiday season, the Los Angeles County area experienced an alarming wake-up call when several fires broke out during a one week period. It was evident early on that the fires were at the hands of a serial arsonist intent on burning everything in his path. Because the incident locations took place in multiple agency jurisdictions, the investigation required investigators from agencies ranging from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles Fire Department, Los Angeles County Fire Department, and members of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Assembling all of the agencies under one Joint Tasks Force was no small task but what was equally impressive was the Joint Information Center established to communicate one unified public message utilizing social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Nixle and agency websites.

Finalists in the other awards categories will be announced throughout this week on this blog. The Social Media Investigator finalists were announced July 16th. Check back to see the finalists for Excellence in a Large Agency tomorrow. Winners will be announced September 10th at The SMILE Conference™ in Richmond, Virginia.

The ConnectedCOPS Awards were created by LAwS Communications with the intent of recognizing the good work being done by individual officers and law enforcement agencies with social media. The international law enforcement community will be considered for these awards. Any officer or agency anywhere in the world is eligible.

One of the tens of thousands of third-party apps available to help a tweeter use Twitter caught my eye recently. It had functionality I’d been seeking for a long time for the Bellevue Police Department in Nebraska. We launched it immediately.

Among many other things, GroupTweet allows accounts to retweet important people automatically by the inclusion of a hashtag. In Bellevue, for the past three years the officers would tweet and would be manually retweeted into the police tweetstream. There are many other auto-retweet tools, but we couldn’t find one that would include the original tweeter name as well as make the tweet look like any other retweet.

There were two features that were must-haves:
1. The retweet needed to include the original tweeter’s name.
2. We didn’t want every tweet to be retweeted from each tweeter.

GroupTweet solves both problems. It gives you a range of tweet format choices. And the original tweeter can determine which of his/her tweets is retweeted by the main account.

In the image above, the tweet sent by @SgtCReed contains the hashtag #pd. When he sent it, it was nearly instantaneously retweetd by @BellevuePolice. Any tweet he doesn’t want retweeted, he would simply leave out the hashtag. And also note, the hashtag is omitted in the retweet. That’s a special option in GroupTweet.

Another use for GroupTweet would be for select internal communication needs. One could set up a “protected” account on Twitter where you have to be approved before following it. Put that account into GroupTweet. The account can be configured to receive messages from its GroupTweet members via direct message, those direct messages would then be retweeted by the private/locked account to be seen by the other members. This last paragraph will be a bit more clear after you’ve played around with GroupTweet, which I hope you do.

My recent series on how to make the most of Twitter for workers in the criminal justice system created a decent amount of interest among police, probation and legal staff but very little from those working in prison.

This is entirely unsurprising since people inside generally don’t have access to mobile phones or the internet.

So, if prison officers can’t access Twitter, how can a prisoner tweet – and do so regularly?

Mark was convicted of the murder of his father in 2010 and is currently appealing against that conviction.

Before his conviction, Mark was an avid Tweeter and Matthew and Andy worked out a way for him to continue to use Twitter from inside in order to get support from his family and friends and to publicise his appeal.
How it’s done

Essentially, Matthew and Andy wrote software which subscribes to all the tweets sent to Mark’s account (@tap_ma) and compiles them into an email message.

These tweets are then sent to Mark using the emailaprisoner service which allows anyone to write to prisoners, when the email reaches the prison, it is printed out and passed on to the prisoner.

These emails are limited to 2,500 characters, but because Tweets are famously only 140 characters long, this equates to 15-20 messages at a time.

Twitter direct messages can also be passed on in the same way.

Unfortunately, the technology (for fairly obvious prison security reasons) only works one way.

So for Mark to reply to his tweets, he has to write a traditional letter which includes a series of Tweets which Matthew and Andy then type and post online.

In the article, Mark describes how even this snailmail version of Twitter makes him feel in much closer contact with his friends and more supported as he copes with prison life.

About ConnectedCOPS

The vision behind ConnectedCOPS is to enhance law officers’ ability to succeed with social media tools by providing insight, encouragement, education and the overall support required. It is also to promote the insightful thoughts of the law enforcement social media visionaries by providing them a voice on this blog.